Corsair Dominator 4GB DDR3 1600Mhz C7 Memory Kit Review

Corsair Dominator PC3-12800 Real World Testing

Synthetic memory tests are great to see what your PC memory kit can do but what we really care about is the impact this high performance memory has on our daily activities. We picked the two most common tasks that enthusiast use this type of memory for in an attempt to improve performance, gaming and media encoding.

Battlefield Bad Company 2:

This is currently one of my favorite games and being fairly new it can really push a system if you crank up the eye candy. However to minimize other variables I turned off all the eye candy and used low settings when testing. I used both the lowest resolution and the native of my 24″ Dell monitor for this game (1024×768 and 1920×1200). Using FRAPS bench mark test I captured 60 seconds of real world game play on line to the same server and tried to use the same map for each memory kit. FRAPS then gave me the average in frames per second (FPS) that I recorded.

Interesting that while the stock Dominator kit was not the best in the synthetic memory tests it had the best FPS in real world gaming. You can clearly see the over clock helped my FPS even at 1920×1200 by nice 11.3 FPS if that could only help my aiming skills a little more.

Team Fortress 2:

Another one of my favorite first person shooter games that has been out for a few years is Team Fortress 2. This version has decent graphics but does not tax the system like BFBC2 does. I would call it a medium load game on the system. Again I turned off all eye candy and simply played with both 800×600 and 1920×1200 resolutions and utilized FRAPS to give me averaged FPS readings. I played on line to the same server and tried to play the same map when I did my FPS capture.

The resolution had much more impact to the FPS on this game but again you can see the 30 FPS gain from stock when you over clock this memory.

Counter Strike:Source:

This game has been around for ages and the graphics tell you so. It is still a fun shooter that I used to spend days playing back when on line FPS first were hitting the scene. There are still tournaments today that have this as one of the games that teams can test their skill. Same as the other two, FRAPS and resolutions of 800×600 and 1920 x 1200. I played on line on the same server with the same map for all kits.

It appears that the extra 4GB in that Corsair Vengeance kit made a big difference at 800 x 600. This was such a difference I ran the test a few times thinking something was messed up with my testing but each time I had similar results. This game is much less constrained by the video system as any modern video card can easily play this Direct X 9 game with all the eye candy maxed out. At 1920 x 1200 you can see the kits at 1600Mhz are all fairly close again, but at 2132Mhz the Corsair Dominator kit jumps way up gaining an additional 12 FPS.

Adobe Premier Pro CS5:

This is the latest version of Adobe’s award winning video editing suit that is used for everything from home movies to full post production for featured films. In order to test these memory kits impact on media encoding I loaded a previously recorded 450MB AVI movie and exported it as 720p MPEG2 movie while using a stop watch to record the time it took Premier to transcode and save the new file.

The overclocking knocked 7 seconds off the time it took to transcode that video from the stock settings. That might not seem like much but if you are batch rendering a multi gigabyte movie those gains start to add up.